Anomaly

Anomaly

R. S. Hill

Rizer felt his head coming forward. A mild hypnic jerk snapped it back. He was awake again. His recurring nightmare was clearer. The vindictive man, whose senseless intentions and uncontrollable greed preceded him, was coming closer. Soon they would meet, and the dispute would be settled. Time was running out. Again he resisted those pathetic tears that always found their way to the corners of his eyes. He needed to focus. It was imperative that he concentrate on the present. Just as he had always dreamed, light years of space surrounded him. Pure air flowed through his tiny nostrils and massaged his fragile lungs. Soon, the antiseptic odor inside Magellan's multi-purpose lab returned his disoriented senses to the clarity of that beautiful smile.

"You were dreaming again." Liza's face came into focus, her eyes blinking rapidly. "Pretty violent, I assume?"

Rizer wouldn't respond. She drifted beside him and removed the minute electrode that was fastened by an adhesive pad to his left temporal lobe. Again, he could not help but notice the cleavage concealed underneath her snug environment suit. She was an amazing woman. But it was those brilliant blue eyes and her optimistic smile that made him feel wanted. During his lapse, Liza had recorded his brain waves.

"Wow!" Her eyes popped like exploding stars as she scanned the EEG and prepared to compare it with the rest of the data she had on file.

"Look at these saw tooth waves David? Was it the same dream?"

After what seemed like another brief lapse, Rizer located Liza across the lab scrolling through her data files. They contained years of his subconscious brain activity. The data she had compiled and analyzed for so long demonstrated a significant correlation between radical brain activity during REM sleep and the eventual prophetic outcome of dreams reported during that sleep period. The more intense the brain waves, the more likely the dream would eventually come true. Charting Rizer's brain waves in zero gravity had proved to be a good idea. For reasons unknown, it allowed him greater access to REM sleep and other's minds. But, because of the synthetic environment and his own feeble condition, chunks of time continued to slip past him unnoticed. Liza maintained a constant watch over his vital signs via I-MAXX, the ship's on board computer. Occasionally, she administered a mild amphetamine through a sustaining IV that was powered by a small hydraulic pump. The extra boosts helped to limit his lapses, but Rizer felt that the constant fluctuations in consciousness were hindering his ability to function properly. His condition was deteriorating, and Liza wasn't sure why. She suggested that maybe he'd been working too hard monitoring and reconfiguring the growth rate tables for the terraforming project. While this seemed plausible, Rizer could not shake the uncanny notion that his own guilt had found a way to rise up from the depths of his subconscious and demand retribution for what he had done.

'MARS COVER-UP ENDS IN TRAGEDY,' the head lines would read. And while his nightmare always first revealed to him the image of a vindictive man, a stranger, floating toward him, it was always the headline that never failed to wake him. But each day his atmospheric analysis and biological experiments on the red planet's surface were conclusive. The spectacular eruptions (triggered by thermonuclear detonators) of Olympia Mons and several other strategically located volcanoes on the Martian surface not only succeeded in warming the planet and melting the polar ice, it also released carbon dioxide and water vapor into the frozen Martian atmosphere. At this very hour, Magellan was orbiting the second habitable planet in the solar system. This was just the beginning, but what a sad beginning it had become. For some time now, the follow-up mission to monitor the planet's new environment had been complete. The surface had been relatively free of seismic disturbances and the development of poisonous gases had not be detected. Mars was prepared for phase three. The altered life forms Rizer had engineered specifically for the new Martian environment were ready to be introduced. But for any person who cared that centuries of environmental abuse had numbered the days for human survival on earth, this news would be considered not only a miracle but a second chance. His supporters, Allied Exploration Corporation and the United International Space Association (USIA), upon hearing the news, would converge on the lonely red world. No longer would a stubborn visionary, with a lesson to teach the world about responsibility and conservation, be able to protect his new world.

"Earth to Rizer! Come in Rizer."

"Huh," he answered wondering how long he'd been out this time.

"Huh," she mimicked him, then dropped her lower lip to apologize for her playful mockery. She smiled innocently then looked him square in the eyes.

"Why are you hiding this dream from me David?"

"T-to protect you."

"Oh, I see. You're protecting me and Mars, but never yourself. Right?"

Though the idea crossed his mind many times, he never wanted to know what she was thinking. Her clever psychoanalysis had allowed her to learn all there was to know about him. She could, in a manner of speaking, read his mind. Yet the thought of him going inside her was unspeakable. They had become more than just friends, they were equals.

"Tell me a story?" He whined to her.

"What kind of story?" Her eyes rolled.

She'd moved again. Another lapse he realized after an instant.

"Over here David!" Liza was inputting commands into I-MAXX. The tone that followed indicated that the central computer had released control of the air quality regulator to Liza. Today it seemed a little humorous that his life depended on periodic manual adjustments to the air in the lab. Even though I-MAXX constantly recycled the Magellan's air, the slightest impurities, if not purged, could kill him.

"A love story." He recalled his train of thought.

"You are so sappy these days."

His eyes felt heavy. A tear appeared in his eye. It wasn't her comment that had touched him, it was the future he'd worked so hard to change. When they would meet? He fully understood that the man in the dream would not be able to understand why Mars needed protection. There were so many things that men like him did not understand or were still unwilling to admit. How does one explain to another that they are responsible for the death of the earth?

"It was just a joke David." He knew he looked pathetic, but he was trying. That was all that had ever mattered to Liza.

"I-MAXX says the men from earth will be arriving one hour and twenty-six minutes from now."

"What about my story?"

"We should start prepping you, David."

"--I assume they'll want to review all my data?"

"Probably." She answered quickly, but did not look at him.

"Well then, I-MAXX and I have prepared a pre-selected data package that contains all the information they need. What they don't know can't be used against us."

"Whatever David."

"What?"

Liza sighed. Her eyes fell away from him like two dying stars, never to be seen the way they once were. "I think we should prep, David."

"Fine."

After more than an hour of meditative exercises, the mild amphetamine entered his system through the IV and spread a numbing surge of energy that coated his neural passageways with artificial zeal.

"Why are you regressing?" Liza asked unexpectedly. Then she turned his voice prompted terminal toward him so that he could respond after reading the notes she'd been taking on his behavior patterns during the past month.

"I don't know."

"Come off it, David. This is your shrink talking."

He refused to look at her. It was all right there, in the dream, his voice, her eyes. Why did she have to make him say it.

"Stop punishing yourself!" Her voice cracked.

"--What's it like to be happy?"

"You're avoiding the issue, David."

"Well, the freak would like to know!"

"Please don't do this?"

"Oh, no problem. You see, I have this grotesque vein that divides my eyes and sweeps through the center of a bulbous head that can't grow hair. It pulsates when I get angry. See? I am a freakish Lilliputian; a miniature ghoul, a genuine anomaly that'll never be a real man."

Liza didn't speak for a long time. He regretted making her feel helpless, but sometimes he just couldn't stop the pain, the reality, the future.

"How should I know about happiness?"

"Because you're a complete person."

"Oh David, think about what you're saying?"

"So."

"So deal with who you are David and not with who you think you should be because of some stupid norm. I know it's hard, especially for someone as special as you, but--"

"--Sure Liza."

"Don't patronize me! Talk to me."

Rizer peered out the tiny portal at the monstrous red planet he'd been playing God to most of his life. It deserved to be more than just another place for humanity to dump its waste. It was a beautiful gift, a treasure to be cultivated, shared and preserved.

"David?"

"Often when I lapse, my mind travels to the surface of Mars. I see Allied Corp's probes poking around on my planet. Do you think this is a genuine premonition or just a hallucination?"

Liza's honest eyes pierced through his facade; the cynical curve to her smile extracted a guilty frown from his own face. The decision to mislead his supporters about the progress of his project and the condition of Mars after rebirth was based on the necessity for the continuing education of humanity. They just weren't ready for another planet.

"I think you created an image in your mind based on the threats Allied Corp made against you. Is that what's bothering you?"

"But I am clairvoyant aren't I?"

"You've done enough David. You don't have to prove anything to the world, OK?" She drifted close to him, kissed his forehead and sailed away.

"How come you never got married Liza?"

"Why do ask me questions that you know the answers to?"

"Courtesy. Some people deserve it."

Liza drifted about the tiny lab checking and rechecking the docking systems while she talked about her first and only love affair. When she got to the part about how she'd given up everything for the chance to counsel the celebrated prodigy, Rizer felt proud. From the very beginning they had clicked. Before Liza had joined him, life had been a pointless and lonely.

Some of his fondest memories came at the shelter were the good sisters treated him with the kindness and respect his ignorant parents couldn't bear. But even their prayers could not heal a boy's defective respiratory system. After several months, he was taken to a hospital where he spent the next three years of his life on and off respirators and in and out of liquefied oxygen incubators while his deformed lungs grew stronger. By the age of ten not only was he able to breath on his own for several hours at a time, he'd managed to stun his tutors with an accelerated learning capacity and the uncanny ability to see into another person's mind and predict the future through his dreams. It was Liza's compassion and enthusiasm that mercifully freed his abused psyche from the daily fortune telling circus to the complex synchronicity of mathematics and engineering.

By his eighteenth birthday he'd obtained advanced degrees in aerodynamic space design and environmental engineering. He realized his calling in life one day after a frightening dream that detailed the irreversible condition of the earth. Providing the people with an alternative world was a dream many shared. Only David Rizer could initiate a radical solution to the problem: rejuvenate Mars!

Shortly after graduation, he won support from UISA and Allied Corporation and began working on Magellan, his revolutionary deep space laboratory. Its entire design had come to him in an elaborate dream and provided his terraforming project with the final element needed to make it a reality.

A series of tones from I-MAXX announced that preliminary docking procedures would begin shortly. Rizer felt nervous.

"Could I have another boost?" He knew she would refuse, but not for long.

"No, David."

"Please? I don't think I can stay conscious very long. I'm very stressed."

She injected a small dose of the drug into the IV. Liza returned to her seat and waited for the I-MAXX to announce a successful merger. After a brief docking, Liza unbuckled her docking harness and left the lab to greet their guests. Rizer turned his attention to Mars. The view was uplifting. With Demios hanging in the background, Rizer suddenly found it strange that, like himself, Mars had once been considered dead. Somehow, he could always clearly recall the day he laid in the dirt where her parents had left him, gasping for air, until his own sister's compassionate arms carried him to the convent. How had humanity become so cruel? It was question he'd asked of himself too many times. He knew what he had to do. Rittled with sincere guilt and remorse, Rizer took a deep breath and concentrated all of his mind's power on the group that approached. He could hear their conversation in his mind as he tried to locate the man he'd seen in his dreams. Both men were impressed with Magellan's intricate architecture and how efficient and homey their artificial environment appeared

"So I-MAXX monitors all the life support and surface experiments twenty-four hours a day?"

"That's correct." Liza voice was filled with insecurity. She understood that everything they had worked for depended on the outcome of this audit. Just minutes later, they were just outside the lab entrance.

"After we pass through the decontamination unit and into the lab, you'll experience a little dizziness, shortness of breath or fatigue. This will depend on what kind of shape you're in. But you should get used to the air quickly." She punched her security code and entered the vestibule that screened their bodies and slowly introduced them to Rizer's air.

"Please." She warned both men. "I can't emphasize enough! His appearance is shocking at first, but he is the most perceptive, sensitive human being I've ever known. Please be considerate."

A green light flashed over the lab entrance. The door opened from the center and Liza floated in followed by two clean shaven men wearing Freedom Moon Base environment suits. The bald visitor's eyes popped. An expected quiver in his lips followed. The other man was far too calm.

"Hello," the balding scientist finally broke the tension. "I'm Dr. Maroka from UISA and this is Martin Cross, a special liaison from Allied Corp. I'd like to just say how privileged and--"

"--Let's just get on with this. Rizer snapped. He stared into Cross' eyes. "Liza, could you show Dr. Maroka the rest of our home, while Mr. Cross and I discuss the future."

Liza and Cross were both surprised.

"But David--"

"Please Liza."

She escorted the doctor out of the lab. Cross's calm immediately melted into a fiery tension created by images of mining operations that Rizer detected in the man's narrow mind.

"Your greed is fantastic, sir."

"Jesus you freak," Cross shook his head. "Your like a bunch of ants crawling around inside my head."

"Interesting. You know quite a bit about my delicate biochemistry, don't you?"

"Dam you Rizer! You've kept us away from our planet long enough with your fictitious reports of poison gases and unstable land masses. Fraudulent reporting on a UISA/Allied Corp. contract is a felony pal!"

"Fraud? Interesting choice of words from one who represents an alliance of corporations who are a directly responsible for a century of environmental abuse on earth. I'm sorry, but I can not allow your kind to contaminate this fledgling planet."

"Bull--"

"--A fundamental understanding of this planet's new properties needs to obtained before people like you should be allowed to rape it!"

"Who put you in charge?"

"My sight. Perhaps then, it was God."

"This about revenge. You could care less about God, people, Mars or anything else."

"My intentions are just."

Cross' face was flush with contempt. It was obvious the man had travel 63 million miles to protect his corporations interests.

"You can't punish the world because a few men's accident made a freak out of you. Your misfortune doesn't give you the right to stop us all from growing. We need MARS!"

"Accident?"

"That's right."

"More than one of the companies you represent has admitted to purposely dumping toxic materials containing harmful radioactive substances and lethal PCBs in earth's soil and water supplies for generations. Those companies are responsible and should be held liable for the countless cases of birth defects, terminal cancers, and uninhabitable dead zones that were evacuated around the beginning of the twenty first century. I'm a product of their malfeasance and I live on in order to remind the industrial community that it must be sensitive to the needs of its environment and people."

"So what do you want, besides a perfect world?"

"Terminate those companies responsible from the alliance. Force them to pay the restitution they've avoided all these years and I'll gladly reconsider my position."

"Can't be done."

"Then our conversation is--"

"--Why do you care so much? You're own parents left you to die in a ditch because they were ashamed to call you their son."

"I care because my sister cared enough to save me. And so I vowed that someday Mars would become a shelter for people like her."

Cross looked at his watch, then shut his eyes. Rizer watched him literally shake the surfacing compassion from his tearing eyes and bury it beneath his corrupt soul. He pulled a hypodermic syringe from the sleeve pocket on his suit. His face curled into a wicked grin.

"We're talking about a tremendous supply of natural resources. We're talking unlimited power potential. That's why I am here!"

Rizer stared into his assassin's eyes. Knowing the future had been such a useful toy in the past, but today his gift demanded recompense for the false prophecies he'd uttered in the name of Mars. Cross drifted toward him, then injected a strange chemical into his IV. He seized Rizer's feeble arms and held him motionless for several minutes.

After some time, the door opened suddenly. Liza coasted in. I-MAXX had undoubtedly sounded the silent alarm on her wrist monitor when Rizer's heart rate increased during the struggle.

"You bastard!" She pulled a tazer off the utility rack and stunned Cross the instant she noticed the foreign chemical solidifying in the IV. Rizer watched as Liza and Maroka cruised frantically around the lab searching for an antidote. Their images became hazy; her sobs grew louder. After a short lapse, he woke and saw Maroka pumping his blood full of an organic neutralizer, while Liza transmitted a futile distress signal back to Freedom Base.

Minutes later, after his final lapse, he located his best friend at her terminal crying hysterically. She probably blamed herself because she'd agreed to leave him alone with Cross.

"Liza."

She came quickly to his side. "I did everything I could."

"I know. Please don't cry, it's all for the better."

"How can you say that?"

"Because." Rizer coughed hard and blood eased from his nostrils and mouth. "Martyrs sing songs that never die."

The End